A balance between supply and demand must be determined to meet the parking requirements of motorists. The ability to efficiently allocate and manage on-street parking remains elusive, even when parking requirements are significant, recurring, and known ahead of time. For instance, urban parking spaces characteristically undergo periods of widely skewed demand and utilization, with low demand and light use in some periods, often during the night, and heavy demand and use at other times. Real-time parking occupancy detection systems are an emerging technology in parking management.
Some prior art parking occupancy detection approaches utilize a puck-style sensor configuration that outputs a binary signal when detecting a vehicle in, for example, a parking stall or a particular parking spot. FIG. 1, for example, illustrates respective parking occupancy detection systems 100 for parking occupancy detection in an on-street parking. In the example depicted in FIG. 1, system 100 includes one or more puck-style in-ground sensors 102, 104, 106. Also depicted in FIG. 1 are example parking spaces 110, 108, 112, 114. A vehicle 116 is shown parked in parking space 108 in FIG. 1. It can be assumed that the sensor 104 located closest to the parking space 108 can be employed in the detection of vehicle 116 located in parking spot 108. In the example shown in FIG. 1, the sensors 102, 104, and 106 can provide real-time data in order to aid drivers searching for the parking spots and to reduce traffic congestion in cities due to drivers circling about parking lots in a wasteful and time consuming effort to find parking spots.
On-street/curbside parking space reservation systems have also been proposed based on inputs from in-ground sensors. Such prior art parking space management and reservation systems are based on the use of binary sensor input data for determining parking spot availability only. Hence, customers are unable to preview the parking space before making a reservation or arriving at the desired parking spot.
Video-based parking occupancy detection systems, an example of which is shown in FIG. 2, are a recently developed technology. The example video-based parking occupancy detection system shown in FIG. 2 generally includes an image-capturing unit 152 (e.g., a video camera) mounted on, for example, a pole 151. The image-capturing unit 152 monitors within its field of view one or more vehicles 154, 156, 158 respectively parked in parking spaces 160, 162, 164. This new technology is capable of not only providing binary parking occupancy data of a street, but also sending an image indicating the current parking state of the street.
Based on the foregoing, it is believed that a need exists for an image assisted parking space availability searching and reservation system and method, as will be described in greater detail herein.